Trivia

Trivia refers to information and data considered to be of little value. The term’s modern use began in the 1960s, when college students started question-and-answer contests on their campuses. This led to the 1982 board game Trivial Pursuit, and trivia contests have since appeared at academic levels and in casual settings like bars and restaurants. The word’s roots are Latin: triviae described where one road split into two, formed from tri (three) and viae (roads), literally “three roads.” It came to mean “a public place” and thus “commonplace.” The adjective triviālis in Classical Latin could mean “appropriate to the street corner, commonplace, vulgar,” and in late Latin simply “triple.” In medieval Latin, trivia (singular trivium) referred to the lower division of the Liberal Arts—grammar, rhetoric, and logic—which were foundational to the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

English usage

In English, the adjective trivial appeared in the 15th to 16th century, influenced by all these meanings. A 15th-century translation of Ranulf Higden mentions the arte trivialle (the trivium) and a triuialle distinccion (a threefold division). The sense “trite, commonplace, unimportant” emerged in the late 16th century, notably in Shakespeare. The word Trivia was used as a title by Logan Pearsall Smith in 1902 for a collection of short moral pieces, with More Trivia and All Trivia following.

Modern usage

His 1918 version included the line “I know too much; I have stuffed too many of the facts of History and Science into my intellectuals.” In the 1960s, nostalgic college students began trading questions about popular culture. The first documented labeling of this as “Trivia” was in a 1965 Columbia Daily Spectator column by Ed Goodgold, who then organized the first trivia contests with Dan Carlinsky. Their 1966 book Trivia became a New York Times bestseller. In a later book, they distinguished trivia from minutiae, saying trivia “is concerned with tugging at heartstrings.”

Organized competition

The largest current trivia contest is at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point’s radio station WWSP, a 54-hour weekend fundraiser with eight questions per hour, drawing about 400 teams. The two longest continuous contests are the Great Midwest Trivia Contest at Lawrence University and the Williams Trivia Contest, both debuting in spring 1966.